Why Students Plagiarize?

Plagiarism is a theft. It means that you stole someone's identity, someone's thoughts. It's horrible. We should teach our young generation not to be thieves and avoid plagiarism.

But theft it's not the biggest problem. As educator and psychologist I did a range of anonymous tests and I found that the most common reason of plagiarizing is fear.

Yes, fear.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of being not accepted in college or university.

Fear to show their own feelings and personal opinion.

Psychological pressure from family.Students don't feel teacher's support, sometimes they are afraid their teachers.Lack of motivation.Students plagiarize in case they are stressed out and panicked.Or the simpliest reason - the subject isn't interesting.

/How to teach our students avoid plagiarism without intimidation? By motivating. How to inspire them? How to make them believe in themselves?

I think that schools, colleges and universities should use plagiarism checkers and make free access for students. Nowadays we know a lot of plag detectors, suc as PlagScan, CopyScan, Copyleaks, Plagskan, Plagium, Grammarly, Turnitin and so on. We prefer Unicheckthat provides you with real-time reporting. But anyway such detection tools make the process of defining plagiarism easier.

Replies to This Discussion

Michael, I totally agree with you. A lot of students don't know how to do research work, have to cite, create references or use libraries. It's really a problem. And the main teacher goal is to teach to not afraid and how to study without cheating and copy pasting. I noticed that you've appointed Unicheck. It's a very useful and accurate tool. And I'm sure that this detection tool doesn't have alternatives, because of their high-quality support, service, features and low-cost price, they even have a free package (it means that guys don't want to make money on the education system and care about the quality of education).

I could not have said it better myself. When students plagiarize, it's mostly born from fear rather than laziness or unwillingness to do the work. We use TurnItIn at my school, and I don't use it as a "gotcha" tool, but mostly for the students to keep themselves in check.

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